Today, the singer/songwriter/producer drops his long-awaited debut album, Love is not dying.

Jeremy Zucker didn&rsquo;t set out to be a career musician. Music was something he always loved, something he did on the side, an unrealistic <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/gucci-new-collection-psychedelic-capsule-70s">dream</a>. Except that it wasn&rsquo;t all that&nbsp;unrealistic. He&rsquo;d been releasing music throughout college, and by the time he entered his senior year at Colorado College (where he was pre-med, studying molecular biology), he&rsquo;d been offered multiple deals, and signed with Republic Records.&nbsp;

The 24-year-old New Jersey native released his debut EP, Beach Island, in 2015. In 2019, he and <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/chelsea-cutler-new-album-how-to-be-human">Chelsea Cutler</a> released their project, brent, and the duo ended up on stage on the Today show. He&rsquo;s sold-out stages across Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, and his single, &ldquo;comethru&rdquo; is Gold Certified, with over 1 billion streams on Spotify. His 15&nbsp;million+&nbsp;monthly Spotify listeners place him in the top 200 most listened to artists in the world.&nbsp;

In honor of his debut <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/jessie-reyez-new-album-music-grammy-interview">album</a> release, love is not dying,&nbsp;Zucker talked to L&rsquo;Officiel USA about introspection,&nbsp;being inspired by Brooklyn, and his unique (and lonely) creative process.

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Where are you isolating?

I&#39;m isolating in Brooklyn with my roommate, you know, just getting by.

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What have you been up to during quarantine?

A lot of writing music and a lot of album promo. I&#39;ve been having to sign a lot of physical copies of the album, I&#39;ve been editing videos and making a bunch of stuff, getting ready for release week.

&nbsp;

Tell me a little bit about your music background and how you got started.&nbsp;

I&#39;ve been making music my whole life. I started taking piano lessons when I was like five years old and by the time I was nine or 10, I hated piano and was obsessed with Blink-182. I convinced my parents to let me stop playing <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/the-piano-version-of-lady-gaga-s-joanne-will-break-your-heart">piano</a> and pick up guitar instead. As soon as I started playing guitar, I started covering Blink-182 songs and it wasn&#39;t that much of a leap to then writing my own songs, dabbling in computer <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/categories/music">music</a> and doing a lot of stuff in GarageBand. In high school, I was in a couple of acoustic rock bands. I went to college and majored in molecular biology&nbsp;because at that point, I didn&#39;t think that I was really going to be doing music, it was always something that I did on the side. It was secretly my dream to be an artist and musician, but I didn&#39;t think it was realistic.&nbsp;

In college I was like,&nbsp;plan A is to go to med school, I&#39;ll keep making music on the side and I&#39;ll try my best to make something happen, but if it doesn&#39;t, at least I have a solid career to fall back on. Things just worked out where I started releasing a lot of music in college that really, really slowly and steadily gained a lot of traction. By the time I was a junior, I had a couple of record deal offers and I signed before my senior year. I ended up being back and forth between school and playing shows across the country, opening for <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/q-a-lauv-2019">Lauv</a> in the US and Europe. By the time I graduated, I was able to headline my own US tour that fall. That was two years ago when I graduated college, and I&#39;ve been at it ever since.

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What is your creative process and has it changed since you first started making music?

My creative process has always been really subconscious. I never follow a formula, I never really have a plan when I sit down to make a song. I mess around and then usually something catches my ear and I follow where it takes me. I listen to the emotions that come with certain chords in certain sounds. I&#39;m producing all my own stuff, so it&#39;s just me in a room alone with my computer and a couple of instruments and a couple synthesizers. I create this melodic background and this sonic landscape that makes me feel a certain way, pull at that thread, and follow where that feeling takes me. I end up unearthing feelings and subconscious thoughts or things that I&#39;m thinking about. In that process, I refine and refine and refine and edit and fix stuff, take stuff out, put new stuff in, but all the while I&#39;m looking at it from a scientific perspective as well, where I know things need to be a very specific way. The whole time, it&#39;s almost like molding clay or something; I&#39;m chipping away&nbsp;and chipping away, taking out parts precisely until it ends up exactly what I want it to be. At the end, it&#39;s a very accurate representation of my emotions during a particular time and the things that I went through. It&#39;s this very weird, subconscious, unintentional but intentional process.

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Tell me a little bit about your debut album, love is not dying.

The album is a lot of introspection and it really outlines my whole life this past year and a half from the perspective of my <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/lili-reinhart-riverdale-hustlers-anxiety-swimming-lessons-poems">mental health</a>, my emotions, and my relationships. I started writing it when I got back from my first US tour last fall and wrote the first couple of songs in my bedroom in my first apartment in Brooklyn after graduating. It was a little stuffy, didn&#39;t really have much space, my studio was in my bedroom and as you can imagine a typical bedroom in a low rent Brooklyn apartment, there isn&rsquo;t much room for anything else if you have a <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/electric-lady-studio-september-2018">studio</a> in there also. I wrote the first couple of songs, then did a headline tour in Europe. Then&nbsp;I was back in Brooklyn and wrote a couple more songs.&nbsp;At the end of this past summer, I moved into a better neighborhood in Brooklyn and started renting a studio space that was separate from my apartment. That&#39;s where I started working on the second half of the album.&nbsp;

My process is very slow. I&#39;ll sit in a room five, six days a week and every day for hours be starting ideas and scrapping them because they don&#39;t feel right. A couple of weeks will go by&mdash;it will take me a week or two or three to find an idea that I like enough to actually start working on and start recording. It can be a really grueling process, so my space is really important to me. There&#39;s a lot of frustration that comes with being such a perfectionist in the way that I am with music, so if I can keep every other part of my life in order and inspiring, then I can stay really level headed when I&#39;m making music and not get down on myself if I feel like I&#39;m not producing stuff fast enough, or whatever it is.

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What is your favorite song off the album and why?

A lot of the songs are really special to me. If I had to pick one, I think it would be &quot;Julia&quot; just because it&#39;s such a specific story and it&#39;s so important to me. It&#39;s my favorite song production-wise that I&#39;ve ever worked on, and it&#39;s a really true story. Yeah, I think &quot;Julia&quot; is my favorite.

Jeremy Zucker_Credit Meredith Truax_4.jpg

What inspires you? Where or what do you get inspiration from?&nbsp;

It largely comes from my relationships and my surroundings. Living in Brooklyn definitely inspires a lot, it inspired this whole album, as well as being on the road and seeing all kinds of different places, meeting with fans and people from around the world. Obviously being a fan of other artists and listening to their music always inspires my production, but it&#39;s really just what feels right inside. I try not to look outwards for what&#39;s inspiring the music, it&#39;s very much inward-facing. It&#39;s very much a train of thought, spiralling, internal dialogue.

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If you could collaborate with anybody who would it be?

There are no collaborations on the album, and since I do work so much in solitude, there&#39;s a lot of artists that I respect that I&#39;d like to&nbsp;collaborate with, but I don&#39;t know if I would, if that makes sense. But Paul Jason Klein from Lany and Matty Healy from The 1975, those are two artists and writers that I really look up to.

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What are your hobbies outside of making music?

Especially during quarantine, I have been cooking a lot. Decorating and cleaning, as lame as that sounds. I&#39;m really into <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/tags/film">film</a>, I direct and edit&nbsp;and come up with most of the ideas for&nbsp;my music videos. All of that keeps me pretty busy.

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What&#39;s next for you?

It&#39;s a tricky question right now. We&#39;re trying to see how and when I can tour, but really all that I can do is keep creating from my home until all this stuff blows over.

Jeremy Zucker is the 2020 Tumblr Boy That You Should Be Listening to Now

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